Grab is an online transportation network and technology company that offers wide range of ride-sharing and logistics services through its app in Southeast Asia, specifically in Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia and the Philippines. I was tasked to design a blue sky transportation app for Grab as part of a conceptual assignment.

Deliverables:

• Persona: Myself & identify key user segments beyond myself.

• User flow: Ideal user flow of the end to end online and offline riding experience.

• Competitor analysis: Identifying Grab's competitors and evaluating their strategies relative to those of Grab.

Christine is a second year fashion design university student. She is a cheerful and outgoing person. Among her friends, she is the one who organizes events, parties and get together. She is also an avid live music lover who is always in the loop on great shows happening near her. When it comes to social media, she is active and use it very frequently. She consumes and generates digital information through her mobile phone primarily and laptop secondary.

Pain points:

• As Christine normally goes out in group with friends living in different area. She would appreciate if there is a way for her to apply multiple stops in her ride to pick up her friends and get a total fare price estimate.

• With Christine being out late most of the time, safety has obviously become a concern. Besides just sharing her current ride status to her designated contacts, having a real time conversational aspect will add an extra layer of reassurance.

• Without the ability to book multiple rides at the same time has always been troublesome and worrisome as Christine, being the only one sober for the night, isn’t able to make sure her friends are going home safely.

• In an unfamiliar environment, Christine finds it particularly challenging to navigate around and locate her driver. It often involves back and forth between herself and the driver to finally get them to the same meeting point.

• Very often Christine has to do the initial trip planning effort to get to her destination. That involves having separate discussion with different people across different people in different apps. It is just hassle. She wants to be fed valuable and easy to understand information that could help her make informed decisions so she could better plan her trip at ease.

Scenario

There is a nearby concert that happens in town. Christine is excited about it and she invites 2 of her friends. On the day itself, she is out shopping. She then has a group conversation with her friends on transportation to the concert. She isn’t sure of the address so her friend sends her a screenshot of the location. A Grab contextual app pops up prompting to assist. She approves it. Ride details like destination, pickup time and number of passengers are suggested. Christine adds 3 other multiple stops in her ride so that the driver will be able to pick her friends at different locations. They discuss who to pick first and agree on the total fare. They don’t want to go too early nor too late. So Christine toggles on the congestion activity feature. She sees that it will be too packed if she goes just 30mins before the concert. So they decide to go 90mins before the concert instead. They confirm the booking. She is then presented with an assigned ride to pick up Christine first. When the pickup time approaches, Christine gets a notification 15 minutes prior to her ride.

She starts to walk towards the meeting point but she finds it hard to navigate around the mall. She uses the app and do a quick scan around her surrounding, the app screen shows a trail that will lead to the meeting point. When she is out of the mall, from afar, she can see the driver’s car digitally tinted in green on her screen. Once she gets in the car, 2 other friends who are sharing the ride together are notified. Her current playlist in her Spotify app connects over to the car’s audio system and starts playing the music she was listening. Within the app, her friends and Christine joined in the status broadcast chat room. Where they can see each other location, the ride status and perform a group voice chat. After the concert has ended, 2 of the friends are tipsy as they had too much to drink. Christine launches the Grab app and she arranges rides for each of her friends including herself simultaneously. Through the app, she is able to keep track of her friends’ current locations and gets an arrival status for each. She also adds her friends’ parents into the status broadcast chat room so they are aware of it.

10 new features

1. Context aware / App integration

Smart and well integrated. It understands the user intention. Be it copy pasting an address or having a conversation about the location to go. Stay within your context and overlay the Grab app on it. Everyone is visible of the decision.

2. Congestion activity

Having the ability to predict whether the area will be crowded later in the day will give the user the knowledge to make informed decision.

3. Entertainment / Control system

A seamless transfer of the current user’s screen activity be it the form of listening to music, playing a game or watching a video to the car entertainment system. This might make the journey from point A to point B more enjoyable. The user can also control the different comfort settings in the car, having radio broadcast information and travel guides about the destination etc.

4. Live collaboration

For multiple riders journey, wouldn’t it be easier if we can get everyone to contribute to the booking filling process? It will reduce errors, make things faster and easier for everyone. Providing the users an environment that encourage back-and-forth participation through sharing, editing, or augmenting content. User A can fill in his/her own address while user B is editing another area. Content updates occur in real time. This disperses the responsibility across to all and everyone is involved.

5. Multiple stops

Very often, a user might want to head to the destination with their friends. By having multiple stops in a ride, the user will be able to better estimate the final fare price.

6. Multiple rides

To be able to book multiple rides at once is very helpful especially when your friend couldn’t because events like inebriation, phone out of battery, doesn’t have the app, etc.

7. Optical character recognition

A feature that is able to recognize characters across multiple languages and context and book a ride with just a scan. Imagine a user scans his/her boarding pass and it immediately schedules a ride upon his/her arrival at the correct terminal and gate. They can also scan any print materials be it a poster, business card or QR code.

8. Indoor GPS / Augmented reality

Sometimes, there might be a road block, miscommunication between driver or passenger or an area that is just impossible for the car to park. It will be useful if the user could just have a directed cursor that is connecting to the driver’s location and having the car highlighted digitally to further reaffirm that is the car.

9. Ride hitching search pool

- Ability to generate a search pool of rides that are "hitch friendly" within your travel path. Telling you what car, how many cars, who are in the car and how many spots are left in the car. If you are a driver, you are also able to do the opposite by entering the search pool by sharing your car information.

10. Status broadcast

Ride status isn’t particularly novel. But to further emphasize on the notion of a safe and reliable ride, having a feature such as a live chat group might help. Nothing beats hearing your friends or family’s voice in real time.

User research

Key questions:

• What are the the most frequent tasks you do using product X?

• Explain how you do these tasks (step by step).

• Did product X meet your expectations?

• What other products do you use to accomplish similar tasks and why?

• When you are using product X, do you find anything frustrating that you wish was easier/different?

• Is there anything that you wish product X allowed you to do that it doesn't allow now?

“Traveling to destination B is expensive just for myself. If only there is a feature where I can share a ride with other people so we can split the fare and I don’t have to take public transport like the train. Saving time and money.” — Ruo Jia (Uber)

Uber is rolling out carpool feature in Australia soon.

“My brother needs to go to destination B but neither my parents and myself could send him but we are concern of his safety if he is traveling alone.” — Karen (Uber)

Uber has status report, however Karen is still concerned about it.

“I prefer to Grab over Uber because I can pay by cash.” — Lee Sze (Grab)

Uber is now rolling out cash alternatives.

“I have a bad sense of direction. Even though I fly very often, I still have trouble sometimes navigating around the airports. So this will help greatly!” — Alyssa (Grab)

Socializing my indoor GPS, track driver idea.

“That is really convenience if a single scan of the boarding pass is able to schedule my ride while adjusting if there is a flight delay. In congested airports, sometimes the queue for taxi is long. However parking at the airport isn’t the easiest. So maybe having the driver park somewhere and greet you at the arrival hall?” — Aaron (Uber)

Socializing my OCR idea.

“Why don’t I just get a taxi out the airport? And sometimes for cheaper options, I might prefer to go with a shuttle bus.” — Darren (Grab)

Socializing my OCR idea. I further iterate the thought that the user can select the ride preference, eg: rent a car, purchase the bus ticket in advance through the app, cross border travel ride.

“Troublesome. The time to use the kiosk machine I might as well just grab a taxi. Besides, as a tourist, I will normally plan things ahead before I arrive.” — Min Yee (Uber)

Socializing the idea that tourists are able to perform a “one-off Grab ride” by just tapping on a kiosk machine at the airport. It will launch an instant app. If we could integrate Grab to more apps for our targeted users, have a web app solution or partnering with airlines to promote Grab when users in plane. That might help.

“Sending ride status to multiple contacts is important for the safety of the passengers” — Ben (Grab)

Uber already implemented similar feature “SafetyNet”.

“I hate it when I get to my destination and it is super crowded. Long queues and waiting time for everything just isn’t great.” — Shan (Uber)

This leads me into proposing the congestion activity idea where the user can check the heat map of the current area and get a gauge on the amount of people right there.